Free Road of the Dead by Kevin Brooks

Still staring at Cole, he took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth. “So, listen,” he said, “here’s what I want you to do. There’s a phone box at the end of the High Street. You take your little brother down there and you call yourself a taxi. You wait at the phone box, you get in the taxi, you tell the driver to take you to Plymouth. When you get to the station, you get on the train and go back to London. You do all that for me and I’ll forget about everything else—OK?”
    Cole looked at him for a long time, weighing all the options. I knew what he wanted to do—he wanted to beat the shit out of him, crack his fat head open, smash his smiling face to a pulp—but Cole wasn’t stupid. He knew there was a time and a place for everything. And this wasn’t it.
    He stared at the policeman for a little while longer, letting him see the truth, and then he just nodded.
    “Good,” said the fat man, letting go of his shoulder. “Off you go, then.”
    As we walked out of the bar, I could feel the man with the Quaker’s beard watching Cole closely. Everyone was watching him closely—but the man with the beard was different. He knew what Cole was. He knew what he was bringing. He could already feel the storm coming down.
    Outside the hotel, I watched in silence as Cole checked his cell. From the way he stared at the display and snapped the phone shut, I guessed he didn’t have a signal. He looked at me. I got my phone out of my bag, looked at it, and shook my head.
    “Shit,” he said.
    We started walking toward the phone box at the end of the street. It wasn’t far. Nothing was far around here. You could walk the entire length of the village in about half a minute. The terraced cottages on either side of the street were gray and cold and lifeless, and I counted three more that were boarded up. The large stone house at the end of the street wasn’t boarded up, though. It wasn’t that big, but it seemed to tower over everything else, glowering down at the rest of the village like a stern gray sentinel in the dark.
    I followed along behind Cole, gazing around at thenight. It had really come down now. I could almost feel it, draping itself over the world. It was a different kind of night from the nights I was used to—colder, darker, bigger. It invaded your senses. I could smell the drifting odors of the surrounding moorland. I could hear the secret sounds of the hills. And when I looked up, all I could see was an ocean of stars in a pure black sky, like a million gleaming eyes. I’d never seen so many stars. I wanted to show Cole. I wanted to stand together with him and look up in silence, wondering at the meaning of it all…
    But I knew better than that. Cole doesn’t hold with that kind of thing. Stars are just stars to him—they’re there, and that’s it. What’s there to wonder about? And besides, even if he had wanted to look, he wasn’t in the mood for stars right now. He was boiling up inside. I could tell by the way he was walking—his jaw set tight, his eyes burning holes in the air. It was best not to disturb him. He’d controlled himself in the bar just now, but it wouldn’t take much for him to turn around and go storming back in and rip the place apart.
    So I watched the stars on my own.
    When we got to the phone box, Cole reached into his pocket and pulled out the scrap of paper that Vince had given him earlier. As he unfolded the paper and stared at the phone number, I could feel his anger simmering down and a sense of resentment stumbling up. He didn’t want to have to do this. He didn’t want to ask for anything. And Iguessed if I hadn’t been there, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. If he’d been on his own, he would have just stolen a car and driven off somewhere and spent the night asleep in the back.
    “Do you want me to do it?” I asked him.
    He looked at me.
    “Here,” I said, taking the scrap of paper from his hand. “Have you